


shaker of the earth

by cheloniidae



Series: mine eyes have seen the glory [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Enemies to Friends, F/F, Gen, Post-Game(s), Pre-Game(s), The Divide (Fallout), nonlinear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:32:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8881474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: “I’m not here for you.”


  And Ulysses must take her meaning — that this isn’t a social visit; this is two people visiting the same grave — because he turns his gaze back to the wreckage. “Home isn’t what it was.”

Courier Johanna Hayden keeps coming home.





	

**i.**

General Oliver tells Johanna she’s earned a rest, standing there in the heart of the Legate’s camp, tattered red flags fluttering in the dust-choked air. The Legion’s retreat is sweeter music than any battle hymn, and the Republic’s banner flies high over Hoover Dam. They’ve done good. She's done good.

Still hasn’t paid her debt to the Rangers, or to the NCR, but Lanius’ blood might pay off the interest.

The Dam is alive with cheers; every radio is abuzz with the good news. They’ll mourn later, the soldiers and the families back West, but this is a moment of victory. People part like water before Johanna, giving her a salute or an _honored to serve with you, ma’am_ , regarding their woman-turned-war-machine with awe and pride. A civilian only in name. ( _You'd be halfway to general by now, if_ —)

The woman the Khans buried would've called her a murderer, for the things she’s done. Johanna runs her fingers along the edge of her duster and thinks: the woman the Khans buried already was a murderer.

Two days later — after she celebrates with Stella, after Cass gets over her victory hangover, after Boone tells her he’s going to re-enlist, after news of the NCR’s victory ripples out to every corner of the East and West — Johanna slips silently out of the Lucky 38. The Strip is alive and humming while the rest of the world sleeps; people congratulate her as she weaves through the crowds. She tips her red beret in recognition, looking right through them. It’s the city gates she has her eyes on.

It’s a three day walk to the canyon wreckage. She reckons she can make it in two.

Reckons she has respects to pay.

  


**six.**

Something bad happened near Death Valley.

The news sets Johanna’s feet running east. _Something bad happened near Death Valley._ Over and over, a chorus in her head. The rumors pile up with each mile of road: it was an earthquake; no, it was a bomb; no, it was Legion; _no_ —

The military’s set up a perimeter on the California side of the Divide, where plumes of smoke strangle the sun and her geiger counter’s click turns to a steady whine. A ranger with too-tired eyes stops her running. Civilians can’t go in, he says. Can’t go further. Can’t go home. _Something bad happened near Death Valley._

The ranger tells her: the Divide is gone. He tells her: no one knows what happened. He tells her: no troops sent in have come out.

He tells her: there are no survivors.

The weight of it will hit her later, the sobs and the screams, but now, she only stares at the black clouds marring the sky. Sees behind her eyelids what she should’ve been there to stop: Noemi buried under the ruins of her bar, seashell ring still on her finger; Joy and Ziva and Gabriel turned to ash; Alec and Aaron’s mission-bell laughter crushed out of them by debris so much bigger and heavier than two little boys. (Barely a week since she played cops and robbers with the twins, barely a week since she felt Noemi’s hand on hers, and they’re—)

Johanna breathes in ash, and she holds it in her lungs like a keepsake.

  


**ii.**

Ulysses greets her no differently than before: with a title that fits her like waterlogged armor. Too much weight in it, and not the right kind. Package couriers don’t change the course of wars; package couriers don’t rain nuclear hellfire down on slave empires; package couriers don’t charge towards Legates with their blood singing _glory, glory hallelujah_ in their ears. What she is—

She reckons there’s no word for what she is. For now, courier will have to do.

“Come to boast of the Bear’s victory?” he asks, not turning away from his cliffside vigil. She’s heard ranchers use the same tone on stray bighorners. Like he doesn’t know what to do with her, doesn’t know if she’ll charge or not.

She doesn’t know, either, at first. He was Legion, once. He led slavers to her nation’s doorstep; he tried to cut the Republic’s throat with Old World fire; he put her through Hell and in the path of Benny’s bullets; he showed Elijah the way to the Sierra Madre. (She wakes with the phantom feeling of metal ‘round her neck more nights than not, and she bites her hand to keep from screaming, and no amount of coughing is enough to force the memory of the Cloud from her lungs.)

But the wreckage of the Divide stretches below them all the way to a distant, smoke-hazed horizon; guilt snuffs out her hatred for him like a candle under glass. They both have a history here, whether she likes it or not. Can’t let it go, or it can’t let her go— all amounts to the same thing, in the end. She sits down beside Ulysses on the cliff’s edge, rocks scraping her palms, and wonders what the Hell she’s doing here. It won’t do the dead any good.

(Boone would kill her, talking to a frumentarius. Shoot her clean through the eye.)

“You were wrong ‘bout the Legate,” she says. Her accent is half drawl, half twang; the ends of her sentences flick up like brahmin tails. The surefire voice of a born-and-raised rancher’s daughter, to those who don’t know better. “He didn’t break the Republic; we broke him.” And the only Latin she cares to know: “ _Sic semper tyrannis_.”

“Those words have broken more nations than built them, if history’s true. A lesson there.”

“You saying I should’ve negotiated with a bastard who struck his slaves blind?”

“Without Lanius, without Caesar, without Lucius, without Vulpes—” and there might be an edge of grim satisfaction at the last name, at knowing the fox is as dead as the Twisted Hairs  “—no one to take the Bull’s reigns. It’ll turn on itself, trample the East before it dies. Could have put the idea of loss in him…” He pauses, reconsiders. “No matter, now.”

“And let him walk away from what he did?” The look on her face hardens to flint: cold, unyielding, just waiting for an excuse to spark. Boone’s wife, she remembers. Boone’s child. (Boone’s rifle, and that first intoxicating dose of righteousness as Jeannie May’s blood spattered across the dirt at Johanna’s feet.) “He deserved to die,” she says, deliberate, slow as a fault line. “And I don’t take advice from Legion.”

“Why come here, if you won’t hear my answers?”

“I’m not here for _you_.”

And he must take her meaning — that this isn’t a social visit; this is two people visiting the same grave — because he turns his gaze back to the wreckage. “Home isn’t what it was.”

The Divide is never truly silent. Johanna listens for voices she knows, but there’s no absolution from them. Only the howling wind and Marked Men screaming in the distance, trapped in the Hell she made. And underneath the silence — always, always in her ears — the sound of people gasping for breath on the cross, suffocating under their own weight.

Never knew that sound before Nipton. Before Goodsprings.

That’s the only _before_ that matters. Before, she could look at someone — look in a mirror — and know what face she was seeing. Before, she could remember things without checking her Pip-Boy. Before, she never had to hide in a dark, quiet room, feeling her head about to burst, praying for the migraine to just end, _please, please, make it stop_.

The road back to who she was is as broken as the Divide.

“I spent five years wondering what happened here,” she says, when she can’t stand another moment of not-silence. “Thought if I ever found who did it, I’d…” The sound she makes is too bitter to be a laugh, too dry to be the start of a sob. “Turns out you beat me to it. The Chip gave you what you wanted, after all.”

“You’re still breathing, Courier.”

“More’n one way to kill somebody.” Her fingers brush the twin scars on her temple, scars she’s never tried to hide. Wears them like medals, like warnings. With her other hand, she gestures to the wreckage below. “They wouldn’t recognize me.” She isn't just talking about the physical. Her California lilt makes it rise like a question, and maybe it is.

“No,” Ulysses says, slowly. “They wouldn’t.” He doesn’t sound sorry for it, but the day that they start apologizing to each other is the day the Colorado changes direction. Was only ever going to go one way.

They watch the guttering flames of the Divide until sunset bruises the horizon, and she leaves without looking back.

  


**five.**

The package comes from far in the West, harvested like roe from the cracked shell of Navarro, where sea salt and the acrid scent of plasma weapons mingle on the breeze. It bears the marks of the Divide: thirteen stars shine bright against a sea of blue; red stripes run from them as though the flag is bleeding for its dead country.

Whatever the marks once meant to the world, this is what they mean to Johanna: the sarsaparilla Ziva has waiting for her at the end of a hard road; Joy’s jokes as she helps him fix a generator; Gabriel’s songs echoing through the night; Noemi’s smile, brighter than desert wildflowers after a rainstorm; Alec and Aaron’s identical awed gasps at Johanna’s stories of the ocean, of sequoias, of places where water falls from the sky every day and the sun never peeks out from its hiding place behind the clouds.

(She’d burn the Mojave to the ground for a chance to go back to this moment, to throw the package into the depths of the sea, but done is done and dead is dead.)

Johanna makes her delivery, as she always does. Neither sand nor storms nor deserts can stay her. An OSI officer signs for the package, muttering something about the Enclave.

He doesn’t know it’s a detonator any more than she does.

  


**interlude.**

“This is very important, Johanna,” her father says. They’ve stopped for the night after a full day’s walk along the broken black pavement of the 99, and he’s drawn a shape in the sand off the highway: three chains, linked together. “Do you remember what to do if you see someone with this,” and he taps his forehead, “here?”

Johanna inches away from the sigil. Firelight dances across the dirt, turning it to copper and gold, making the chains look too real and too alive. In her five-year-old imagination, they’re mouths waiting to swallow her whole. Fear knots her stomach.

“Run,” she whispers, as though the chains might wake up.

Her father pats her sand-colored hair. “That’s right, dove. As quick as you can, as far as you can go.”

  


**iii.**

Ranger Chief Marquez says Hanlon recommended her, and Johanna’s heart says _yes_ before it has time to beat.

They call her Ranger Hayden. She tries to shake off the feeling of walking in a dead woman’s skin, traces the words on her badge and whispers like a prayer: _I’ll do your name proud_.

The work keeps her feet moving and her rifle pointed at the Legion. Wanderlust is an old friend, but fury is a newer companion, one that crawled out of her grave and never left her side. When she snapped Benny’s ribs, it steadied her hands; when she shot Vulpes Inculta in broad daylight on the Strip, it drew her finger back on the trigger.

And every day patrolling the Colorado pours more fuel on that flame.

The town — name of Himno, on the east side of the river — is nothing more than a husk by the time her squad gets there. No voices, no screams, just the distant roar of the river and the _crack-thud_ of burnt shacks caving in on themselves. Her helmet filters out the smoke before it reaches her lungs, but she imagines she can smell it. Imagines the taste sticking in the back of her throat, the way it did in Nipton, the way it did in—

There are things she doesn’t think about, anymore.

Doesn’t take them long to search the town. The bodies they find (a mercy, she thinks, to be dead and not in chains) are charred beyond recognition. Faceless, nameless, with no one left to say who they were. Kimball’s dedication of the Hoover Dam Memorial rings through her mind, clear as a gunshot: _we honor our dead by preserving their memories._ But there’ll be no memorial here, nothing to keep the names alive. One more kind of death.

And she knows, deep in her bones, she can’t let the Divide die again.

  


**four.**

There are lessons a woman learns, walking the desert. More practical than spiritual. Carry a gallon of water per day at the least (not too much; weight can kill you as sure as thirst); use every bit of shade you find; never walk when you’re taller than your shadow. The sun will not be kind to you.

The Mojave’s taught her well, and each time Johanna leaves the Divide, it’s before the first rays of light spill over the eastern horizon. Noemi is a night owl at heart, but she wakes in time to see her off. Drinks in every moment with her like parched earth drinks in the rain. Noemi never asks her to stay; they talk about everything, or nothing, and there’s never a question of if Johanna’s coming back. Only when.

They talk about the future.

The sky outside their window is just beginning to lighten; Noemi is lying on their bed, head propped up on an arm, watching Johanna pull her road-worn boots on. Trinkets line the bedside table like a battalion, little mementos from six years of a courier’s travels: seashells from Dayglow; a snowglobe of an ancient pilgrimage site named Hollywood; a glass vial of gold dust from Sac-Town’s streams; wooden animals, no larger than a fist, that she whittles from pine and redwood and cedar on the road.

( _I’ve never seen a seal_ , Noemi says, once, before the woman in her bed breaks the Divide. Johanna presses the six-flippered figurine into her palm and promises: _I’ll show you one, some day. We’ll walk all the way to the water._ )

Johanna lingers on the bed longer than she has to, brushing a lock of hair from Noemi’s face, her touch as light as a sea breeze. The world inside their home is an unlikely Eden; leaving gets harder each time. Noemi takes her hand, presses the back of it to her lips. “It’ll be dawn soon, Jo,” she says, twining their fingers together. Reluctant to see her go, reluctant to make her stay.

And Noemi lets go, as she always does. Always has to. Can’t keep a good courier in one spot for long, and Johanna considers herself one of the best. “Bring me back something pretty,” is what Noemi says. _Come back safe_ , is what she means.

Johanna does both. (Two rings carved from seashell, this time— one for Noemi, one for her. A different promise from gold, but a promise all the same.)

  


**iv.**

Ulysses isn’t at the cliff when she gets there. It looks barren without him, without the line of his shoulders breaking the stretch of the horizon. On one of his walks, she reckons. It’s just as well; she wasn’t planning to ask his permission, anyway.

She has a laser pistol in one hand, a knife from the Sierra Madre in the other, and a list of people she won’t let be forgotten.

The outline comes first, carved into the flattest part of the rock wall she can find: three feet wide, five feet tall, with a rounded top that tapers to a point like the door to a sanctuary. (A door to a world that could’ve been, she thinks, and shakes the thought off like irradiated rain.) It’s harder work than she expects, even with the knife slicing through rock like butter. Her muscles catch on quick enough. Sweat rolls down her face, neck, arms, and the parched air sucks up every drop with all its desert greed, leaving only salt behind on her skin.

Five inches should be a deep enough cut to protect it from the wind, she reckons. And under her hands, bit by bit, piece by piece, the rock face gives way. She starts at the bottom— the uneven ground digs into her knees; the knife’s handle scrapes her hand raw. It’s the closest thing to peace she’s felt in weeks.

By the time footsteps herald Ulysses’ return, she’s cut a square foot of the rock face smooth as steel.

“Carving a gravestone, Courier,” he says, with the barest hint of a question. His shadow falls over her, over the rock. The sun’s lower in the sky than she realized.

“A memorial.” She spares a glance over her shoulder at him. _Like at Boulder City,_ she almost says, _like at the Dam_ , but she holds her tongue. Knows what he thinks of Chief Hanlon’s tactics— her tactics, too. Death from a distance, by bombs, by mines, by traps and trickery. “And I’m not a courier, anymore.”

He chuckles at that, a sound like gravel churning in a river. It startles Johanna into standing up, turning around. “A grave couldn’t take the roads in you,” he says, shaking his head, and she can’t tell whether he’s looking at her with disgust or amusement. “A badge can’t, either.”

Johanna snorts. “Somebody who rants ‘bout symbols as much as you should know better. It’s not just a badge; it _means_ something. Freedom from tyranny. Like your America was s’posed to.”

“Isn’t _my_ America, belongs to history. And its remains here… Your claim to the Divide is stronger than mine.” He looks past her, at the cuts in the rock. “Won’t stop you, but if this is penance— won’t change what was done here. The dead won’t thank you.”

“I’m not asking for thanks.”

“Forgiveness, then.”

“I’m not looking for that, either. They— they deserve some proof folks lived here. Something more’n ruins.” She takes a notebook from her bag: a small thing bound in Brahmin leather, with a pen clipped against its spine. Cost less than a handful of caps, but she holds it like Old World porcelain. Like something irreplaceable.

In it, in her loose, looping scrawl, is every name she remembers from the Divide.

She hates asking him for a favor, hates it with every part of her that sung rapture when she cut Caesar’s throat, but she couldn’t live with herself if she missed a name. If she didn’t ask. “Been writing down all the names I can remember,” she says, holding the notebook out like an olive branch. “Don’t want to forget anybody.”

He takes the notebook— cautious, at first, as though it might be a bomb. Johanna gets back to work as he looks through it. The sound of pen against paper mixes with her knife scraping against the rock; the wind nearly drowns out both of them.

When he hands it back to her, it’s with fifteen more names, written in letters neat enough to be from a typewriter. (The handwriting of someone who learned by copying Old World books, she wouldn’t be surprised.) “Saves them being lost to history,” he says.

For once, they want the same thing.

  


**three.**

The first soldiers pass through the Divide while Johanna is making a delivery to New Reno. She’s hated that city from the first time she set foot in it, since she saw the NCR’s flag flying over a place where brothels treat girls like brahmin. Theirs to sell, theirs to buy, theirs to butcher if a girl tries to leave. And not a damn thing done to stop them.

(She wonders if this is where she would’ve ended up, if not for the Rangers. Chained to a bed in a whorehouse if she was lucky; buried beneath an unmarked grave in Golgotha if she wasn’t.)

Her gratitude to the Rangers is written on her bones, too deep at the heart of her to waver, but her love for the Republic is like its ideals: tarnished, like old silver. The nation could shine brighter than a torch, she thinks, if anyone with enough clout gave a damn to polish it.

Noemi tells Johanna about the soldiers when she returns, feeling grimier from New Reno than from walking the Mojave. A whole squad, she says. “They were headed to some place called Camp Golf, out on the front lines. Said they should get free drinks for it. Can you believe it?” She laughs like the wind chimes she hangs outside their home, fashioned from scrap copper pipe. Johanna wishes she could bottle the sound like water from a spring, carry it as a comfort for the road.

That squad isn’t the last, not by far. Joy has a kind word and a smile for anybody, but when soldiers pass through town, his lips press together thinner than a wisp of smoke. The folks of the Divide look to the him for direction; his distrust fuels theirs. No Republic soldier leaves the Divide feeling they’d be welcome staying there.

Doesn’t stop them from staying, anyway.

The corporal, a young thing in armor that might be more impressive if it weren’t covered in dust, introduces himself as Brian Carwell. The NCR is extending its protection to the Divide, he tells them, as though any of them believe protection is all the NCR is after. Even Johanna, the only one who looks at the flag on his chest with any measure of respect, isn’t that naive.

Joy shows them to an empty house, hands curled into fists at his sides. He tells the twins to stay away from any man or woman in uniform.

“Thought that soldier was gonna surrender, the way you glared at him,” Johanna tells him one day, over the whir of wind turbines. The broken one in front of them is why they’re out at the wind farm. Everyone in the Divide is expected to pitch in, even couriers; tired feet don’t count for much when there’s work to do.

Joy takes his time examining the turbine. His hands — an engineer’s hands, normally steady and precise — tremble. “They turned us into a supply line, and now they act like protecting us is a favor.”

“You don’t think we’re in any danger from those slavers? Caesar’s Legion?”

“If we are, it’s only because the NCR made us a target. Look— we’re over a hundred miles west of the Colorado River. If Caesar’s Legion can get to us, the NCR’s protection was worthless to start with; if they can’t, the Legion is nothing more than a convenient excuse to take us over.”

“You think they’ll make a play.”

“I know they will. The NCR can’t see anything without wanting to own it or break it.”

Johanna should leave it alone, she knows. This is something deeper, more personal, than fears of annexation. No clue what it could be— that’s part of the promise of the Divide, the glue that holds it together. As long as you keep your past buried where it can’t hurt anybody, nobody is going to take a shovel to it. But that old gratitude flares back to life, and she can’t help saying, “Some places are better off for the NCR owning ‘em.”

Joy only chuckles, dark and bitter like the Old World coffee Johanna brings him from the Hub, and hands her a wrench. “Help me take this apart, would you?”

And that’s the end of that.

NCR soldiers guarding the road watch her leave the next morning; even more watch her return. Anxious, like clouds building on the horizon, and the Legion’s shadow hangs over them like the promise of thunder. Promise of chains. _As far as you can go_ , her father said, but the Divide caught her the way a star catches a comet. It was never a fair fight.

  


**interlude.**

Johanna steals just once, when she’s seven. Swipes an issue of _Grognak the Barbarian_ from a passing trader, pages worn petal-soft by the centuries, and slips it into her knapsack when no one’s looking.

Colors bloom across the pages. She traces the pictures in secret, silently mouthing the words. Her parents tell her violence is only okay if it’s your only way out — _to kill one is to kill us all_ ; that’s the New Salem way — and she hangs on their words like vines grow around trees. That’s all they have left of home, her father says. Culture and laws from a place Johanna has never seen. (A place she’ll never see, but it fills up the place in her heart marked _home_ all the same. Leaves no room for any place else.)

Grognak breaks New Salemene law each time he picks up a weapon, each time he fights a battle, but he’s never scared. Johanna wonders what that would feel like; wonders if being that strong would keep the worried looks from her mother’s eyes, stop her father from glancing over his shoulder, stop them both from flinching at too-loud noises.

Her mother catches her, of course. She kneels down to look her in the eye, hands trembling as she grabs Johanna’s shoulders. Her too-tight grip doesn’t hurt half as much as what she says. “A Ranger died so we could be free. Is that how you’re paying her back? Using her gift to _steal_?”

Johanna’s face burns with shame, eyes stinging, red to the tips of her ears. “No, mama.”

That night, she dreams of heroes in bloodied black armor, slaying monsters who growl like chains rattle.

(She knows her parents had a different name before Ranger Augusta Hayden set them free; she never learns what it was.)

 

**two.**

Gabriel — whose brother died crossing the Nopah; who settled in the Divide to stay near his spirit — is the one who suggests the dances.

On nights when the moon’s bright and clear, he starts a fire in the pit in the middle of town. Has to be outside; their numbers are more than eighty strong, and even the town meeting house is barely big enough to fit them all anymore. Gabriel sits on a wooden crate, a fine old guitar cradled in his hands, and starts to play. The old-timers are the first out of their homes, hearing the opening strains of the song. They know what it means.

Some take on the job of knocking on the newcomers’ doors. Johanna grins bright in the moonlight and tells them: _come dance_.

Gabriel sings out the calls once the crowd’s size is to his liking, weaving them into the song’s lyrics. Those who don’t know what they mean catch on soon enough, or stand at the edge of the crowd, clapping in time with the tune. Johanna dances ‘til she’s dizzy, flitting from settler to settler to settler.

(Joy and Ziva only have eyes for each other, and no one dares to cut between them. Ziva is their doctor; Joy is their mayor in all but name— God only knows what the pair might do.)

Noemi finds Johanna in the crowd tonight, the fire reflecting in her eyes. It takes Johanna’s breath away, how the moonlight spills over her. Noemi mock-bows, takes Johanna’s hand before her lungs remembers how to breathe.

The Divide is filled with music.

  


**v.**

Chances to slip away from the front are few and far between. Johanna splits herself between East and West, keeps her destination to herself. She overhears a handful of Rangers taking bets on where she goes. The smart money’s on Goodsprings’ graveyard; Ranger Grant upbraids them for it, then puts twenty caps on deathclaw hunting. Ten to one odds. (Stella quirks an eyebrow at Johanna when she gets back, but keeps any curiosity to herself. Of all people, she knows when questions aren't welcome.)

Ulysses never seems surprised to see Johanna. She reckons he followed her long enough to know where her feet always come back to. It’s a question of when she’ll be there, not if.

They settle into a sort of— routine, is the only word Johanna can think to call it. Hates that she has a routine with a former frumentarius, but she can’t force him from the Divide any more than she can stay away. She works on the memorial; he watches for Marked Men, for Tunnelers, for any monster of the Divide that might reach out its talons to rake the Mojave.

Silence scrapes her nerves raw, and the bouncing tunes on the radio don’t seem right for such somber work, so she fills the air with words. Talks about the West — the sprawling ranches of the northern Valley; the endless fires southwest of Redding; the boundless blue expanse of the ocean, running forever into the horizon; forests of red sequoias, stretching into the sky as though they might reach the sun. _Those trees’ve been alive thousands of years_ , she says. _How’s that for history?_

Ulysses tells her of the East, in turn. The Glass that stretches from Arizona to New Mexico, where nuclear fire melted the sand to glittering green (from before the War, he tells her; America testing its spears against its own barren soil); the great dome of Boulder, left unfinished by armageddon; the canyon Caesar cast his first Legate into, an abyss deeper than even warheads could hope to carve. Ulysses has traveled as much as her, but on different roads. Different choices.

Same destination, in the end.

She finishes the base of the memorial as summer gives way to fall. Starts on the names— the ones she remembers, and the ones that would’ve been forgotten if not for Ulysses. She traces the letters with her laser, first, barely breathing for fear of making a mistake. Checks them off in her notebook once she’s carved them into the rock. She owes them this: her carefulness, her dedication.

And — reluctant as she is to admit it— she reckons she owes Ulysses something, too.

The next time she comes to the Divide, it’s with a gift.

Ulysses looks at the pages in her outstretched hand, looks back at her. “Gave you all the names I know, Courier.”

“This isn’t ‘bout the Divide.” A lie if there ever was one. “It’s a ledger I took from the Fort. You said…” It isn’t like her to hesitate, and uncharted territory is her favorite place to roam, but she falters.“You said your tribe’s history belongs to you. Reckon it’s right you should have this.”

He reads the pages, and she reads him reading: the way his shoulders stiffen, the way his arms tense, the way his face goes as blank as a burned-off tattoo. He runs a finger down a list of names, pauses at one. (She wonders whose— his own, a wife, a lover, a child. The wreckage of a life stretches out behind him, a road that ends with crosses on the I-40 and a tribe’s history thrown on the flames. No way back for him, either.) His hands are too steady, too still, to be anything but forced. “How long have you had these?”

He’s looking at the words, not at her.

“Since the Fort. Me 'n Boone grabbed anything that looked like it could be useful intel.” She hesitates again. Twice in as many minutes, a new record for her. “It was. The brass ordered me to break up the Khans’ alliance with the Legion; I needed something to show ‘em the Legion couldn’t be trusted. That ledger was it. The Khans learned from it.”

And there’s the real gift.

Ulysses breathes— in, out, the sound muffled by his mask. “Used history’s lessons to stop it repeating.” To himself, or to whatever ghosts he sees in the paper’s ink, he says, “I believed no purpose could come of it.”

A silence stretches between them, blanketing the cliffside. It eats away at her; she itches to fill it with something, but she doesn’t. Reckons this makes them even.

“Courier,” he starts to say, and stops.

“Still calling me that? Been more’n a year since I took a delivery job.”

“I won’t call you Ranger,” he says, shaking himself out of whatever moment, whatever memory, the pages dragged him into. Looking at her, not through her.

A moment’s pause, and then: “You could call me Johanna.”

It’s letting him closer and keeping her distance, all at once. If he’s watched her half as close as she thinks he has, he knows who calls her Johanna: not a damn soul. She introduces herself as Johanna Hayden, and the next words out of her mouth are, _but you can call me Jo_. She’s Jo to Cass, to Boone, to Arcade, to the Boomers, to any and every trader she meets along the road.

Not to anyone who helped bring collars and crosses to the Mojave.

Before he can answer, she’s walking east.

  


**one.**

Johanna measures her life in signatures and miles. The miles from the Boneyard to Dayglow, from New Reno to Redding, from Sac Town to Shady Sands, from everywhere to the Divide. Where there’s roads, there’s travelers, and where there’s travelers, there’s bars waiting to sell them a glass to drown their troubles in. Johanna keeps her ear to the ground, listens to the bar-chatter wherever she goes. Not as reputable as the _Shady Sands Herald_ or the _Dayglow Star_ , but no less informative. (She listens for rumors of the Slavers' Guild, always, always.)

“Hear tell there’s a new road east,” says a man on the other side of the bar. It’s a rundown place outside the walls of Shady Sands, a stark contrast to the order and cleanliness of the Republic’s capital. The sign over the door reads The First Gentleman, but the crowd doesn’t live up to the name.

The bar Noemi keeps is nicer, Johanna can’t help thinking, dusty and quiet as it is. (She doesn’t recognize homesickness, even as it dances a jig on her heart.)

“Bullshit,” the man across from him says. “Ain’t nothing but the Long 15.”

“I ain’t lyin’. Some crazy folk set up camp by Death Valley, call it the Divide. Met a fella who ran a caravan through it, straight to New Vegas.”

The men’s conversation turns to New Vegas and Gomorrah; Johanna tunes them out, grinning into her drink, pride settling in her stomach warm as whiskey. There’s hardly a road in California she hasn’t walked, but this is the first time she’s helped make one.

Word of the Divide brings more than just caravans passing through; it brings people looking for a new life. Each time Johanna rolls into town, carrying deliveries of supplies to keep the Divide alive, a handful of unfamiliar faces greet her. She helps Joy get them settled: sets up greenhouses, fixes hinges back on ancient doors, shows the newcomers what places they can go without getting ripped to shreds by deathclaws.

Some leave, frightened off by the everyday toil or the unforgiving land. Johanna knocks on a door more than once — wanting to say hello, to ask how the greenhouse is going, to check on the people she’s come to think of as hers — only for Ziva or Joy to tell her they left while she was gone making deliveries. _They might come back,_ Johanna always says, knowing it isn’t true. She’s the only one who returns, the only one who walks that road again and again.

But some of the settlers stay.

There’s Simmal and Gex, who treat numbers like scripture; there’s Timothy Lang, a ghoul who can recite Old World poetry like he was born breathing it; there’s Orson Hinkley, who argues religion with Ziva for hours. He doesn’t stop even as she’s stitching up his leg from a run-in with a starving coyote. Ziva tells Johanna the story as they sip at sarsaparillas, watching Alec and Aaron play in the early afternoon heat. Nearly makes Johanna choke on her drink, trying not to laugh at Ziva’s deep-voiced impression of him.

Dozens more folks trickle in, from the East as much as West, tribal as much as not. Any old allegiances, old wars, are left buried in the sand. The hollowed-out shell of an Old World town swells with life, as though it’s spent the centuries waiting for people to fill its aging buildings.

Between the newcomers and the caravaneers, Noemi has enough customers to make barkeeping her main job. “I like it better than shooting,” she tells Johanna, wiping the counter ‘til it gleams. Her prized hunting rifle stays under the counter in case of trouble, but most folks know better than to trifle with a woman who can shoot a deathclaw through the eye. “Besides, we’re turning into a proper town, now. Any proper town needs a proper saloon.”

“You decided on a name, yet?”

“I was thinking we could come up with one together. You’ve been to more bars than me, after all.”

“Hey.” Johanna puts a hand to her chest, mock-offended, but she can’t help laughing. Can’t help the contentment blooming inside her, a feeling like the smell of sequoias.

They paint the sign together, marking the letters in whitewash: _The Stars & Stripes_. The Old World flag greets them at every turn, waits in every abandoned building; it’s only fair they give it its due. Johanna hangs the sign out front, relishing the feeling of a hammer and nails in her hands.

They look up at their handiwork when it’s done, Noemi’s shoulder pressing against her own, the warmth of the other woman seeping into her. Johanna feels a bit of her heart splinter off, lodge itself in the Divide like a miner claiming a stake.

She isn’t too much of a fool to know it’s the other way around.

Johanna leaves and comes back, leaves and comes back, like a heartbeat pumping blood. Instead of oxygen, she carries supplies, repair parts, medicine. She’s part of the Divide, and the Divide is part of her; she can’t let it wither and die anymore than she could her own foot.

This is where another courier picks up her trail, but she doesn't know it yet. Only knows the welcoming taste of Noemi’s lips, the light in Alec’s eyes when she brings a fresh set of crayons back for him, the dirt of a greenhouse under her hands, the pleasure of watching something grow. How can she look behind to see what might be trailing her, when the road ahead has everything she cares for?

Home is its own kind of blindness.

  


**vi.**

She comes back, later. She always does. Leaves the memorial a little more complete each time, rescues another handful of names from the jaws of oblivion. They keep talking— about the states of the West, the tribes of the East. Never about the ledger, never about home. Circling their own histories like ravens with nowhere to land.

(The truth: they talk about the ledger every time he calls her Johanna.)

**Author's Note:**

> "For his sake Poseidon, shaker of the earth, although he does not kill Odysseus, yet drives him back from the land of his fathers."  
> \- Homer, _The Odyssey_


End file.
